On energy security of smartphones

Abstract

The availability of smartphones is still severely restricted by the limited battery lifetime. To help users understand the energy consumption, major mobile platforms support fine-grained energy profiling for each app. In this paper, we present a new threat, called energy collateral attacks, which can abuse and mislead all existing energy modeling approaches. In particular, energy collateral attacks are able to divulge battery stealthily through interprocess communication, wakelock, and screen. To defend against those attacks, we propose E-Android to accurately profile the energy consumption in a comprehensive manner. E-Android monitors energy collateral related events and maintains energy consumption for relevant apps. We utilize E-Android to measure the energy consumption under the attack of six energy malware and two normal scenarios. While Android fails to disclose all these energy-malware-based attacks, EAndroid can accurately profile energy consumption and reveal the existence of energy malware.